Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul has been a guest on the show of wacky conspiracy theorist radio host Alex Jones multiple times in the past couple years.
For Jones, who runs the site Infowars.com and broadcasts his eponymous radio show out of Austin, 9/11 trutherism is only the beginning. He regularly devotes his show to investigating the Bilderberg Group, the “rise of FEMA,” the Bohemian Grove, how to fight the New World Order, etc.
The ideologies of Rand Paul and Jones overlap when it come to areas like the Fed and the putative assault on U.S. sovereignty by international institutions (or, as Jones would say, “totalitarian world government”). Paul appeared on Jones’ show at least three times in 2009.
David Corn at Mother Jones reports:
But Rand Paul has shown sympathy for Jones’ overall view of a world of global conspiracies, and he has expressed support for some of Jones’ unconventional ideas.
During a July 23, 2009 show, Jones, decrying the Wall Street bailout, asked Paul, “This isn’t really socialism….Isn’t this more akin to fascism?” Paul replied, “You’re exactly right.” Later on the show, while Jones was denouncing cap-and-trade legislation (which he says could lead to “toilet paper taxes”) and calling for investigating Al Gore, Paul noted that should the climate bill become law, “we will have an army of armed EPA agents–thousands of them.”
For those not familiar with Jones, check out this New Republic profile:
He represents an old strain of American conservatism–isolationist, anti-Wall Street, paranoid about elite conspiracies–that last flowered during the John Birch Society’s heyday. … Steeped in the rhetoric of the militia movement, he’s long been a champion of Randy Weaver, the white supremacist whose wife and son were killed in 1992 by federal agents at Ruby Ridge, Idaho. (He’s asserted that the people behind Ruby Ridge and Waco were also behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombings–“Clinton’s Reichstag.”)
Here’s Paul on Jones’ show in July 2009:
